Eating and Mourning the Corpse of the World: Ecological Cannibalism and Elegiac Protomourning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract

Cormac McCarthy’s ecopocalyptic novel, The Road (2006), is rife with cannibalism. Throughout McCarthy’s oeuvre, however, cannibalism is not common; it only appears in one previous novel and does not earn an entry in the index of The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy (2013). This article argues that the abundance of cannibalism in this novel is not incidental. Rather, McCarthy’s frequent depictions of cannibalism within the setting of ecological apocalypse encourages the reader to pair these two aspects of the text; The Road suggests that insofar as the planetary ecosystem is the “body” of the human species, recent human history has been a spectacle of the particular type of species self-cannibalization I call “ecological cannibalism.” This article questions the novel’s apparently clear moral dichotomy between “good guys” and bad guys (129), arguing that the man and the boy are not fundamentally distinct from human meat-eaters. Rather, an ecological perspective reveals a nebulous ethical zone that complicates McCarthy’s ostensible bifurcation of characters into the categories of unequivocal good and evil. Finally, this article argues that McCarthy tempers the novel’s tendency toward environmentalist proselytizing by engaging in what I call “elegiac protomourning,” a literary technique that acknowledges the bare reality of loss rather than simply re-emphasizing the environmentalist drive to conserve.